Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (1969), title page and table of contents

The book is dedicated:

[Inside front flap:]

Poe and the British Magazine Tradition

MICHAEL ALLEN

The career of Edgar Allan Poe, as journalist, critic, editor, and writer, exemplifies more clearly than that of any American author of his age the literary artist's struggle to preserve his integrity against the demands of a developing mass audience. In the complex strategies Poe devised to deal with his particular situation, Mr. Allen holds, lies much of Poe's continuing interest for the modern world.

Viewing Poe not as a unique offshoot of American culture, but in the long perspective of the British literary tradition, the author shows how Poe consciously tried to solve the “quality-popularity dilemma” by adapting certain British journalistic conventions to his own ends and audience, as he conceived it. The study, focused upon Poe's career as a journalist between 1835 and 1849, reaches into the early nineteenth-century literary background which formed Poe's taste — his wide reading in British journals like Blackwood's and The New Monthly.

He shows how, with an intensity all his own, Poe used the “Blackwood formula” and other British journalistic conventions, “projecting a literary personality in the same way, engaging in the same kind of critical controversy; striking [inside back flap:] a similar self-consciously ‘learned’ pose in his fiction, criticism, and general writing; exploiting the hoax in a similar way; and imitating several of the British modes of magazine fiction, in particular the burlesque and the horror tale.” He likens Poe's efforts to the attempts of such writers as Coleridge, De Quincey, Bulwer, and Wilson to satisfy simultaneously the demands of both an aristocratic and an expanding audience.

In the adaptations Poe attempted to make to the growing demands of American publishing, Mr. Allen finds the source of his desperate statement, “to be controlled is to be ruined,” and of his painful vacillation between obeisance to the “many” and the virtual construction of an imaginary elite audience for his “dream magazine,” an obsession which persisted to the end of his life.

Clearly and cogently argued, Mr. Allen's study explores Poe's attitudes towards fact and fiction, prose and poetry, and also discusses the audience as an important part of the literary experience. It puts Poe firmly in place as part of a European journalistic tradition, exaggerated and dislocated by American reality yet essentially unassimilable to established American culture patterns,

Michael Allen is Lecturer in English at Queens University, Belfast.

Jacket design by Edgar Blakeney

[From the back of the dust jacket]

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The text for this electronic version of this book was taken from an original printed form, revised for XHTML/CSS and to follow our own formatting preferences. Pagination of the original edition has been included. Although considerable effort has been made to be true to the original printed edition, some modifications have been made in formatting for this electronic presentation.

Dr. Michael Leckenby Allen (1935-2011) was a professor of English at Queen's University in Belfast, UK. He was born in England and spent his childhood in Wales. His undergraduate and MA degrees were earned, respectively, in 1958 and 1960, at the University of Leeds. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham, in England, in 1965. (His dissertation was the basis of this book.) He began teaching at Queen's University in 1965, and retired in 2001. He had a particular interest in Irish poets, and was a personal friend of Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. Dr. Allen published Close Readings: Essays on Irish Poetry in 2015. He is buried in Roselawn Cemetery, in Belfast, UK. His wife, Maureen Alden, taught classics for many years at Queen's University, specializing in ancient Greece. Although he was certainly not the first to notice Poe's interest in British magazines of the era, Dr. Allen's book is the most detailed study and remains a standard reference work on the subject.

This book was originally published in 1969, and does not appear to have ever been reprinted. Oxford University Press originally owned the copyright, but does not appear to have renewed the copyright. In contacting Oxford University Press directly, they have confirmed that they do not hold a copyright and cannot grant use permission. This status leaves it in something of a grey area in regard to copyright. Dr. Allen is deceased, and we have not been able to contact any living survivors (although his widow and two children may well still be alive). This text, then, is presented under a broad assumption of fair use, and with the idea that Dr. Allen would have been pleased to have his work widely available for personal or educational purposes and without any charge for access. If a reasonable claim for copyright can be documented, please contact the Poe Society of Baltimore to arrange for permission, or to request that we remove the material.